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The Serum Run: Sled Dogs Save the Day-Part 2

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A call for help was flashed across the wires and dog teams were posted at way stations along the route.  In an attempt to bring recognition to all the souls that braved the trail, the following account, in its entirety, was taken from Coppinger’s World of Sled Dogs: From Siberia to Sport Racing (Howell Book House 1977):

“The Alaskan Railroad sent a special train out of Anchorage, north to the end of the line in Nenana, with a small package of serum aboard.  Waiting at Nenana was William “Wild Bill” Shannon, the U.S. mail driver for the Northern Commercial Company.  He set out late on the 27th of January for Tolovana, 52-miles to the northwest, with a team of nine Malamutes, a big working team for those days.  The thermometer at the station read -50º.  The serum was wrapped in blankets to keep it from the damaging cold.

At noon on the 28th Shannon turned the serum over to Dan Green at Tolovana.  Green raced his eight dogs the 31-miles to Manley Hot Springs in weather featuring temperatures of –30º, and a wind of some twenty miles an hour: a chill factor of –70º for Green and his dogs.

At Manley Hot Springs, the Athabascan Indian Jonny Folger took over and ran 28-miles to Fish Lake with a team of eight dogs and the temperature still standing at thirty degrees below zero.

From Fish Lake to Tanana, Sam Joseph carried the serum 26-miles at an amazing average of nine miles an hour.  The temperature was dropping.

From Tanana to Kallads, 34-miles away, Titus Nicholi mushed his seven dogs through weather at forty below.  There Dave Corning took over in –42º temperatures; he averaged eight miles an hour for the 24 miles from Kallads to the Nine Mile cabin.

He was met by Edgar Kalland who raced his seven dogs to Kokrines, thirty miles away, with the temperature now at –44º.

From Kokrines to Ruby, another thirty miles, Harry Pitka fought his way through a white-out at 47 degrees below zero.  He somehow managed an incredible nine miles an hour.  At Ruby, Bill McCartney took the package and raced with his seven dogs the 28-miles to Whiskey Creek in slightly warming weather:  -43º now.

At Whiskey Creek, seven o’clock at night, Edgar Nollner continued on at –40º for the 24-miles to Galena, with seven dogs.

Edgar’s brother, George Nollner, carried the serum 18-miles from Galena to Bishop Mountain with the same seven dogs, and the temperatures began to plunge.  The dogs trotted the whole 42-miles for the Nollner brothers; it was too dark to lope.

At Bishop Mountain, the 22-year-old Athabascan Charlie Evans began with a team of nine dogs the run to Nulato, thirty miles away.  The temperature dived to 64 degrees below zero and the trip was a nightmare for Evans.  He had no rabbit skins to protect the vulnerable groin area of his dogs, and two of them began to freeze, even as they ran.  Loading the crippled huskies onto his sled, Evans continued on.  He ran in front of the sled, pulling on the traces, trying to help his seven remaining dogs.  Five hours after leaving Bishop Mountain he reached Nulato.  It was four o’clock in the morning and all he could manage was to carry his sick dogs into the cabin and collapse by the stove.  Recalling the event some fifty years later, Charlie Evans said, “It was real cold.”

Tommy Patsy loaded the serum from Evans’ sled onto his own and sped off into the darkness toward Kaltag, 36-miles distant.  Urging his team on at 58 degrees below zero, it took him three and a half hours to cover the distance.  He got there Friday noon, January 30th.  In less than three days, 13 dog teams had covered 377-miles.  They were a little over halfway to Nome.

At Kaltag, the trail left the Yukon River and headed over the mountains to the coast.  In the mountains, the weather grew worse.  The Athabascan River pilot Jackscrew took the serum at Kaltag and cursed his way through a blinding snowstorm at fifty below zero to Old Woman shelter cabin, forty miles away.  There he was met by Eskimo Victor Anagick who took off in blowing, drifting snow toward Unalakleet, 34-miles away on Norton Sound.

At Unalakleet, another Eskimo, Myles Gonangnan, was waiting, and set off in his turn with the serum for Shaktoolik.  He had to break trail for his eight-dog team through waist-high drifts for the entire forty miles.  They were traveling in one of the worst snowstorms in memory.  He made it in just under 12 hours and fell exhausted and frostbitten, but with the serum safe for the next sled.

Harry Ivanoff then started for Golovin.  Half a mile along to the trail the team picked up the scent of reindeer, and bedlam broke loose.  Fighting to straighten out his dogs, Ivanoff looked up to see Leonhard Seppala and his team of racing Siberians, the only such dogs in the relay, hustling down the trail.

Apparently the blizzard had interfered with communications and Nome thought there was no relay team available at Shaktoolik.  So Seppala had driven the team a good 150-miles, from Nome, to meet the precious package.  Ivanoff gave him the serum, and Seppala, turning back, chose the straight route across Norton Sound, a route traditionally avoided by dog drivers.  The high winds were pushing sea water up over the ice, which promised to break up at any moment and drift out into the Bering Sea, Seppala, serum and all.  But Seppala’s confidence in his proven fast dogs and his successful crossing of the creaking ice once that day stimulated his belief that he had a reasonable chance, with luck, to make it back across to Golovin and save hours, perhaps days.

In warming temperatures that made the ice more dangerous, Seppala sped off for Golovin, 91-miles west by the route across the Sound.  The little Norwegian and his lead dog Togo, made 84-miles that day.  Twenty of those miles were across the heaving, sloshing, breaking sea ice.  But Togo, the hero of many a sport sled dog race and veteran of many a trail, knew the dangers.  He also had the uncanny ability to begin carrying out Seppala’s wishes even before Seppala gave a command.  Togo led the fragile train of dogs, sled and driver as quickly as he could across the massive array of jagged, groaning ice floes.  They reached Isaacs Point, on the other side, late Saturday night.  There Seppala stopped to feed his team and tend to their raw, cut feet.  Continuing on [the] next morning in the blizzard, he met Charlie Olson at Golovin in mid-afternoon.  There was eighty miles left to go.

Tomorrow on the Dog Sledding Examiner: The Serum Run Part 3

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Dr. Robert Forto is the Dog Sledding Examiner, a musher training for his first Iditarod under the Team Ineka banner and the host of the popular, Mush! You Huskies Radio Show

The Serum Run: Sled Dogs Save the Day-Part 1

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The Serum Run: Sled Dogs Save the Day-Part 1

In 1925, the population of Nome, Alaska was just two thousand.  Most of the miners, prospectors and adventurers of the gold rush had moved on.  The city was the site of a potential catastrophe, an epidemic of diphtheria.  Diphtheria is a “specific, localized, and superficial bacterial infection.”  It produces a powerful and deadly toxin that in the first quarter of the twentieth century claimed over half the lives of anyone unlucky enough to contract it.  The residents of Nome were in dire danger, without an adequate supply of antitoxin the city’s prognosis was at best poor.

The challenges of delivering the twenty-five pound package of life-saving antitoxin were many.  It would have to be picked up from the railhead in Nenana and transported to Nome over six hundred seventy four miles of the “roughest and most desolate” terrain found anywhere on the planet.  The trip, which normally took twenty-five days, would have to be undertaken in just fifteen; in the middle of an arctic winter where the bone-chilling temperatures ranged from -19ºF to -64ºF.  To complicate matters it was dark most of the time in late January and early February.

Richard Byrd said, “The Eskimo husky still is, as he always has been, the one absolutely reliable means of polar advance.”  Rest assured it was this reliability that spared the lives of the citizenry of Nome.  Twenty or so brave mushers: natives, mail carriers and white men put their lives, and the lives of their dogs, on the line for the isolated city.  They did not risk it all for money, or for glory, but simply because it was the right thing to do.

Gunnar Kasson and Leonhard Seppala received most of the credit and glory associated with the Nome Serum Run; however, they were just a small part in a much larger, history-making adventure.  It was primarily Native Alaskans and mail drivers who weathered the biting cold and the blinding storms who conquered the brutal trail.  Those drivers were thanked by President Coolidge and even received a medal for their efforts, but they were mostly over-looked by the media.

The tale begins in January of 1925, in Nome, Alaska.  The only physician in Nome, Dr. Curtis Welch, discovered a case of the dreaded “Black Death” disease, diphtheria.  The doctor’s supply of antitoxin was very small, and Nome was the medical center for a district of some eleven thousand extremely vulnerable natives.

There was a supply of antitoxin in Anchorage, Alaska.  As previously alluded to, the difficulty was in transporting the serum to Nome.  There were two biplanes at that time in Alaska, the problem with using them was that not only were they disassembled for the winter, they were also both open-cockpit.  The days were short, and the weather was horribly cold.  The pilots were willing to give it a go, but it was decided that the risk to the only serum in Alaska was too high for such a reckless endeavor.  So just as the natives had done for centuries, the residents of Nome pinned their hope of survival on sled dogs.

Tomorrow: Part 2 of The Serum Run: Sled Dogs Save the Day

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Dr. Robert Forto is the Dog Sledding Examiner, a musher training for his first Iditarod under the Team Ineka banner and the host of the popular, Mush! You Huskies Radio Show

The Mounties

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The Mounties

Canada’s federal police force did not receive its current title until 1920.  It was originally called the Northwest Mounted Rifles.  However, the United States’ adverse reaction to what it felt was an “armed force” patrolling the United States-Canadian border precipitated the title being changed to the Northwest Mounted Police.

At the turn of the century the Mounted Police had been using dog teams in excess of twenty-five years to patrol three hundred thousand square miles of wilderness.  The first

dog team patrolled the vast region in 1873, searching for men who were illegally trading whiskey to the natives on the west shore of Lake Michigan.  The patrol was successful, with six men arrested, and an undisclosed amount of whiskey confiscated.

The stage was now set for a romanticism that would follow the “Mounties” for decades.  The excitement of danger and mystery would lead to what was to become a romantic exploitation of what was often a brutal job that these brave officers carried out.  Inspector Rivett-Carnac wrote the following article in 1938 for the RCMP Quarterly, which quelled most of the imagined romance associated with a patrol.

“I remember very well, some years ago, seeing a somewhat dramatic film about the North, in which the hero, riding on a sleigh, set off across the Barren Lands towards the Arctic Ocean, where he gallantly rescued a damsel in distress who was held captive by certain villainous characters.  Every time they appeared on the screen, the hero and his dogs were seen to be skimming over the snow at full gallop.  Despite the fact that the journey was one of some hundreds of miles…the sled carried no food for man or dog.  One could only assume that the driver in this instance was so confident of his dogs that he considered a few sandwiches in his hip pocket would be sufficient to sustain life until his objective was reached!”

As any musher knows, dog driving is not nearly as easy as that; a fact in which the good Inspector would certainly agree. The romance is certainly not apparent while traveling considerable distances.  Inspector Rivett-Carnac spoke of the hardships of long distance arctic travel in his article.  “Night after night in the snow at temperatures ranging to 60 degrees below zero…one’s feet having been cut or chafed by the snowshoe strings…bloodstained moccasins…the next day’s travels.”  He also noted that “Modern methods of transportation have penetrated the northern regions of late years. It is unlikely that the dog team as a means of transportation over the northern snows will ever become entirely obsolete, because, although it is a slow means of locomotion, it is one which will get the traveler to his destination–provided that his own powers are equal to those of his dogs.”

A mere thirty years later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police “forsook” their dog teams.  In 1969, the last official patrol of any distance by sled dog was taken; it was a regular, everyday trip in which Special Constable Peter Benjamin traveled for four weeks, with twenty-one dogs, the 500-miles from Old Crow to Fort McPherson and back.

Dog Sledding Legend Jean Bryar on Mushing Radio

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Dog Sledding Legend Jean Bryar on Mushing Radio

On the popular Mush! You Huskies Radio Show we are continuing our summer series on the dog sledding legends and those people that made this sport what it is today. This week we will profile one of the greatest women mushers during the 1960’s and 70’s which so many great mushers followed her lead such as Libby Riddles, Susan Butcher and Dee Dee Jonrowe just to name a few.

In the coming weeks we have a very special series airing on the show. We are in the initial talks with a true sled dog historian, Nancy Cowan and she will be joining us for a couple of shows to talk about ‘Doc’ Lombard and others that influenced this sport and made it what it is today.

Listen to Mush You Huskies: Jean Bryar

Jean Bryar became the foremost woman sled dog driver in the world during the sixties and seventies. Although her husband, Keith, is remembered as the third factor in the Lombard-Belford-Bryar hegemony, Jean was no backseat member of the Bryar team. She worked her way through the New England racing circuit, usually finishing near the top against some of the toughest competition New England has ever had. Having developed one of the best Siberian Husky racing teams in the Northeast, the Bryar’s made the big jump to Alaska with the other New England competitors in the early sixties. They, too, were entranced by the abilities of the Alaskan dogs, and in 1962 they bought a superb example of this racing husky, a leader named Brandy. They paid $1001.00 for him.

During the next four seasons Keith and Jean both drove Brandy at the head of the team that won several of the most important sled dog races in North America. In 1963 they captured the Eastern International at Quebec, the World Championship at Laconia and the Women’s North American Championship at Fairbanks. In Alaska in 1962, 1963 and 1964, Jean paralleled “Doc” Lombard’s wins in the men’s North American with wins of her own in the women’s.

Following Keith Bryar’s successful bid for the Men’s North American Championship in 1965 and his subsequent retirement from racing, Jean Bryar maintained the Norvik Kennels in Center Harbor, New Hampshire and expanded her racing schedule. Coordinating her training and racing talents with those of another champion driver and dog musher, Dick Moulton, Jean went on to secure her own reputation in the sporting world, selecting only the most challenging professional races for their teams. Bryar and Moulton left well-defined tracks wherever they competed.

Bryar had the determination and flexibility of an all-time great sled dog driver. In her first try at the North American, for example, Bryar’s lead dog was of a breed never before known to qualify for such a position, a small longhaired Border Collie. She tended to pamper her dogs a little more than some of her colleague’s thought was necessary, but her achievement as a racer and trainer justified her techniques. Energetic and personable, Bryar was completely dedicated to her dogs. During the off-season she managed her kennel and worked as a real estate agent. When the cool mornings of fall arrived it was back to the business of training puppies and stretching the veteran’s muscles for a new racing season, leaving her work as a realtor to the warmer weather.

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Dr. Robert Forto is the Dog Sledding Examiner, a musher training for his first Iditarod under the Team Ineka banner and the host of the popular, Mush You Huskies Radio Show

Quest for the South Pole

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Quest For the South Pole

Discovered in 1840, Antarctica lies almost concentrically about the South Pole.  Fittingly enough its name means “opposite to the arctic”, and this fifth largest continent would be essentially circular except for the Antarctica Peninsula. It was here, in this unforgiving environment that two different men chose two different paths, and two different aides in their quests to reach the South Pole.  Both made it to their destinations, only one however made it back.  There is not any doubt that the difference was the dogs, or lack thereof.

Robert F. Scott (1868-1912) was a British explorer who made several attempts to reach the South Pole.  From their base camp on Ross Island, Scott, accompanied by Earnest Henry Shackleton (1874-1922), and E.A. Wilson penetrated as close as 82º 17’ S. to the pole at the Ross Ice Shelf on December 30, 1902.  Scott believed that the use of sled dogs was somehow disreputable.  “No journey made with dogs,” Captain Scott wrote, “can approach the height of that fine conception which is realized when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers, and difficulties by their own unaided efforts.”

Later, Shackleton and another party of five men reached 88º 23’ S. on January 9, 1909, a point a mere 97-miles from the pole.  “The successful experimental use of hardy Manchurian ponies, and the pioneering of a route up the great Beardmore Glacier to the polar plateau by Shackleton, paved the way for the epic trip of Scott in 1911-12 to the South Pole.”

The second participant in the epic race was Roald Amundsen (1872-1928).  Amundsen was the Norwegian explorer that ultimately discovered the South Pole, but just as with Peary on the other side of the world, his triumph came with a price.

Amundsen began his history-making journey by first studying medicine.  In 1897, he joined a Belgian Antarctica expedition as a mate, and was assigned to the “Belgica”.  The “Belgica”, under the command of Captain Adrien de Gerlache, became trapped in the pack ice in March of 1898.  The ship drifted with the ice of the Bellingshausen Sea until the following March; proving conclusively that one could winter the Antarctic.

It is noteworthy to mention that Amundsen was accompanied to Antarctica by the American physician-explorer F.A. Cook. Amundsen and Cook were largely responsible for bringing the “Belgica’s” crew through severe attacks of scurvy.

A few years later Amundsen made plans to conquer the Northwest Passage.  With a crew of only six he sailed secretly on the “Gjöa”, a forty seven-ton sloop, in order to avoid creditors.  He was the first man to take a ship through the fabled passage.  He then began to focus his attention on accomplishing spectacular polar achievements.

Amundsen planned to drift across the North Pole in a ship called the “Fram”.  This plan was secretly altered when the news that Robert E. Peary had reached the North Pole assaulted the wires.  He continued his preparations and in June of 1910 Amundsen left Norway; no one save his brother knew that he sailed for the South Pole instead of the already conquered North Pole.  Amundsen sailed to the Ross Sea and set up a base camp some sixty-miles closer to the pole than his adversary Captain Scott.  As a matter of personal, and nationalistic pride it was vital to him that he reach the pole first.

Unlike Scott’s party who chose to rely primarily on horses and the Beardmore Glacier route, Amundsen and his party chose to travel with sledges pulled by dogs and to take the Axel Heiberg Glacier route.  He reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911, beating Captain Scott by thirty-four days.  Appley Cherry-Garrard was a member of Scott’s previous excursions, he described the vast differences between the canines’ and ponies’ ability to adapt to the polar environment in the following account:

“The animals suffer the most, and during the this first blizzard all our ponies were weakened, and two of them became practically useless…Nothing was left undone for them which we could manage, but necessarily the Antarctic is a grim place for ponies.  I think Scott felt the sufferings of the ponies more than the animals themselves.  It was different with the dogs.  These fairly warm blizzards were only a rest for them.  Snugly curled up in [a] hole in the snow they allowed themselves to be drifted over.  Bieleglas and Vaida, two half-brothers who pulled side by side, always insisted upon sharing one hole, and for greater warmth one would lie on top of the other.  At intervals of two hours or so they fraternally changed places.”

Amundsen’s team arrived safely back at Franheim Station at the Bay of Whales with very little difficulty.  On January 17, 1912, seventy-eight days after leaving camp, Captain Scott’s final assault team achieved the South Pole.  The despair of coming so far just to find the Norwegian flag must have been nearly overwhelming.  Their return trek was aggravatingly slow as men succumbed to the environment.  Scott’s party was caught in a blizzard on the Ross Ice Shelf.  There they pitched their tents, and their food and fuel dwindled, then finally ran out.  Only eleven-miles from their One Ton Camp, Scott and his companions perished.

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Dr. Robert Forto is the Dog Sledding Examiner, a musher training for his first Iditarod under the Team Ineka banner and the host of the popular, Mush! You Huskies radio show.

Voyages to the Ends of the Earth

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Voyages to the Ends of the Earth

An explorer’s work is vastly routine, and at times mundane. Raymond Coppinger stated it as an “unglamorous collecting of data, and charting of land and water.”  But every once and a while a mission comes along that captivates the imagination of man; explorers and the public alike.  Man’s insatiable quest for the North and South Poles were such missions, they produced both triumphs and disasters.

Quest for the North Pole

From the beginning the men who braved the Polar Regions have depended on dog teams.  In the 1870’s and 1880’s Nares and Greely used dog teams in their attempts to reach the North Pole.  In 1895, Nansen was to become the white man that had reached the furthest north, he accomplished this feat with the aide of native Eskimo dogs.  Nansen’s record was broken by a mere twenty-two miles in 1901 by Italian Naval officer, Lt. Cagni.

Robert Edwin Peary (1856-1920) is widely credited with reaching the North Pole first, a feat that he accomplished in April of 1909.  For Peary this victory was only achieved after a hard fought battle that began in 1886 with a trip that started at Disco Bay, and proceeded one-hundred miles over the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Peary returned to the Arctic in 1891 with seven companions that included his wife, and F.A. Cook.  Leaving from Hvalsund in the spring, Peary and his party sledged an impressive twelve hundred miles to the northeast of Greenland, and discovered Independence Fjord in the process.  It is important to note Peary’s befriending of an isolated tribe of Eskimo referred to as the “Arctic Highlanders”.  These natives, according to Peary, were of the “greatest assistance” on his later expeditions.  Peary made additional excursions into the arctic regions in 1893, 1894, 1896, and 1897.

In 1898, Peary announced his intentions of reaching the North Pole. Because of his single-mindedness, over the next four years Peary relentlessly reconnoitered possible routes from bases at Etah in Inglefield Land and Fort Conger on Ellesmere Island.  He adopted Eskimo techniques of travel, shelter and clothing.  The “Arctic Highlanders” were his drivers, and his igloo builders.  Following the prescribed methods of McClintock, food and supplies were cached, and a trail was laid.

In 1905, Peary made a valiant attempt at reaching the North Pole.  His group traveled with over two hundred sled dogs and reached latitude 87º 6’ N. eclipsing Lt. Cagni’s closet approach.  Severe ice conditions conspired with a run of bad weather, and forced the party to make a premature return.

In February of 1909, Peary departed Cape Columbia, Ellesmere Island with twenty-four men, nineteen sleds, and one hundred and thirty-three Eskimo sled dogs.  In the final leg of the trip Matthew Henson, and four Eskimos accompanied Peary.  The men with their courageous dogs “covered the last 133-miles in five forced marches, arriving at that magic spot where there is no North, East, or West on April 6, 1909.”

The group then made the 485-mile return trip in a nearly unbelievable sixteen days.  His once friend, F.A. Cook, claimed to have superseded Peary’s accomplishment by reaching the North Pole during the previous season.  Cook’s claims have been widely discredited, yet they continued to mar the enjoyment of Peary’s triumph.  That the dispute was even taken seriously at all was owed to the fact that Peary’s return trip was so astonishingly quick.  However, most experienced mushers agree that one’s return trip on a marked trail is generally almost twice as fast.  Peary died on February 20, 1920 in Washington D.C. His contributions to the sled dog and scientific communities however live on.

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Dr. Robert Forto is the Dog Sledding Examiner, a musher training for his first Iditarod under the Team Ineka banner and the host of the popular, Mush! You Huskies radio show.